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I ran into the Conservative MP for Croydon trawling the village High Street in Sanderstead, Surrey. He was campaigning for re-election in the Thatcher years. He asked if I could vote for him. I said it was not my place to vote in a British election.
“Why not?” he asked. “You are a Commonwealth citizen, aren’t you?”
I said indeed I was.
“You pay taxes, don’t you?”
I said indeed, I did.
“Then you’re entitled to vote. It’s your right!”
I said I considered myself a guest in his country. The taxes I paid were for the privilege of living under the protection of Her Majesty the Queen. What I did not go on to say was that the bones of my ancestor lie in the hallowed Esan ground of Edo-land in Nigeria, and that that fact alone enforced a special relationship which will always bid me to Nigeria in a way I could not feel about Britain. The emotional sense of not wholly belonging that comes with not being a native son flakes the exile’s self confidence in his right to participate in the affairs of the host community. I respect those that settle comfortably into an adopted nationality and have no yearning to look back over their shoulder. It is a transformation I have not been able to make.
However, although Nigeria is my homeland and I have never felt the need to make a substitution for my native-born nationality, I have never consciously taken refuge in Nigerian nationalism, which may be a contradiction. I certainly have never been a nationalist activist, unless I count the stirrings of anti-colonialism when we sang “God save our gracious Zik” to bastardise the British Anthem’s “God save our gracious King” required of us at schoolchildren’s parade on Empire Day. I am more comfortable describing myself as an African patriot. I have never used my race as an excuse, nor hidden behind it as a shield. I am a citizen of the world community who happens to be Black.
Excerpted from Then Spoke The Thunder, by Peter Enahoro, published in 2009 by Broadmind Communications, London.
Enahoro, author of How to be a Nigerian, You Gotta Cry to Laugh and The Complete Nigerian, died in London Monday, April 24, 2023. One of Nigeria’s most celebrated editors/columnists, he was 88.
